The neural instantiation of spontaneous counterfactual thought

Many of the most interesting cognitive feats that humans perform require us to consider not just the things that actually occur but also alternative possibilities. We often do this explicitly (e.g., when imagining precisely how a first date could have gone better), but other times we do it spontaneously and implicitly (e.g., when thinking, "I have to catch this bus," implying bad alternatives if the bus is not caught). A growing body of research has identified a core set of neural processes involved in explicit, episodic counterfactual thinking. Little is known, however, about the processes supporting the spontaneous, possibly implicit representation of alternatives. To make progress on this question, we induced participants to spontaneously generate counterfactual alternatives by asking them to judge whether agents were forced to make a particular choice or chose freely-a judgment that implicitly depends on their alternative options. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found 14 clusters that were preferentially engaged when participants were making force judgments (which elicit the spontaneous consideration of alternatives) compared to judgments of what actually occurred (which do not elicit alternatives). These clusters were widely distributed throughout the brain, including in the bilateral prefrontal cortex, bilateral inferior parietal lobule, bilateral middle and inferior temporal gyri, bilateral posterior cingulate, and bilateral caudate. In many of these regions, we additionally show that variability in the neural signal correlates with trial-by-trial variability in participants' force judgments. Our findings provide a first characterization of the neural substrates of the spontaneous representation of counterfactual alternatives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).